Supernatural Reverse-Bang Fill- "Take Two" (1/5)
Art Prompt Title: Untitled
Art link: Art Masterlist
Prompt Number: 1016
Artist: Farfadine
Fic Title: Take Two
Author: crazybeagle
Fandom/Genre: Supernatural Humor/Angst/Hurt-comfort
Pairing(s): Gen, none (Characters: Castiel, Ruby, Dean, Sam, Bobby)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 13,750
Warnings: Language, allusions to torture and violence, psychological trauma
Summary: AU of 7.02. The Leviathans and the souls destroyed each other. But Dean, Sam, and Bobby know that things are never that simple. They know it for a fact when they find two dark-haired children, one wearing face of a former friend and one wearing the face of a former enemy, lying on the panic room floor....
Chapter One
The souls were gone.
The Leviathans were gone too, apparently. They'd have to make damn sure of that fact, but after a supernova of light when the souls collided with the gaping black holes in reality that were the disembodied Leviathans, and both exploded into a shower of white-hot sparks that burned their skin before fizzling out down on the concrete. Light and thunder ricocheting off the impenetrable iron walls of the panic room, consuming itself-like Leviathan pinball, Bobby had said.
They'd been prepared to leave for Bootback as per Death's instructions, but when Cas had stumbled through Bobby's door, begging for help and telling them it was too late, he couldn't hold back either souls or Leviathans anymore, they'd foregone all plans to do the ritual and Dean and Sam had helped drag him down to the panic room. The hope was, when Cas exploded, as he seemed to think that he would, and stat, that they could somewhat contain it in there, even temporarily, at least enough to keep them all from dying. In retrospect, it probably would've been smarter just to have dropped him off right in the doorway and slammed the door shut immediately rather than try to lug him over to the bed (because it wasn't like he really deserved that anyway) while Bobby waited just in the doorway for them, holding the door closed but unlatched behind him. But for whatever it was worth, they were unscathed, the Leviathans and souls apparently vanished.
But they all knew, things were never that simple.
They knew, because lying side-by-side on the dusty floor of the panic room, in a puddle of thick black liquid, were two pale, unconscious, dark-haired children. A boy and a girl.
So yeah.
Things were never that simple.
But what was of far more interest to Dean than what had just occurred between the souls and the Leviathans, or even the children-children-lying on the floor, was the fact that, sometime while the friggin' lights show or whatever it was had been going on, Sam had been driven to his knees, arms wrapped around himself, trembling.
"Sam?" A second later and Dean was down on his own knees, an arm hovering over Sam's back, sure that this was another one of the hallucinations that according to Death, Sam had not been telling them about.
Except, apparently, he was wrong. Because Sam had slapped a hand over his mouth, screwed his eyes shut, and was now coughing, hard and deep, shoulders heaving.
"Sam!" he repeated. Sam just kept coughing, nearly pitching forward onto the floor from the force of it. When it finally stopped, it stopped abruptly. Dazed, Sam let himself lean back until he was sitting, Dean catching him so he didn't slam his head into the wall behind them. He held up his hand, still cupped, expression uncomprehending as he looked at it.
His palm was full of blood. Bright. It coated his fingers, seeped out between them to drip onto the floor.
Dean's heart skipped a beat and a half at the sight of it. One of the children on the floor stirred feebly, the boy, maybe, but Dean ignored him. Bobby, somewhere close by, started to say something, but his voice was cut off when Sam coughed again, gagged, and spat out another, massive mouthful onto the gritty floor.
"Sam, hey-" He took Sam's shoulders, barely hearing his own words over the roaring in his ears or the blind panic mounting in his chest. "What's wrong? Did the Leviathans…" He didn't think the Leviathans or the souls, if that's what those even were, had gotten near enough to any of them to do any damage-bouncing around at least a good 15 feet over their heads. But it would be just their luck, wouldn't it, if one rogue one had bounced away from the rest and hurt Sam.
But Sam was shaking his head, brow furrowed. He spat out another mouthful of blood, wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, and rasped out, "No…'m fine."
Dean snorted. The sound was vaguely hysterical. "No. Whatever you are, it's not friggin' fine." He wiped away some of the blood on Sam's chin with his own sleeve. Out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw one of the children sit up. Bobby made a noise of surprise. Dean glanced at the child-the boy-but as weird-assed as that was, he needed to let Bobby deal with it.
"No, seriously," Sam said, after spitting again and clearing his throat. "I'm not hurt, nothing hurts…feel okay now. Except for, uh…" he gestured at the blood, down the front of his shirt and splattered on the floor, a genuinely baffled expression is his face.
"Yeah, except for that," Dean muttered. "Just don't move, okay?"
Sam blinked and nodded.
"Bobby!" Dean called over one shoulder. "We need some help here! Sam's-"
Sam cut him off. "Dean." His voice was odd. Small.
Dean whipped back around, anxious. "Yeah?"
Sam pointed, eyes wide, at the blood on the ground.
Something was…off. It was shifting, churning, the color of it going from the vivid red of fresh blood to the sickly dark burgundy of an old wound. And it was collecting, all of it, into a single pool-running off of Sam's hands, and even off of where it had sunk in splotches onto his shirt, leaving not a single stain behind, onto the ground to flow into the growing puddle before them.
Sam had gone pale, and he was blinking rapidly down at the blood, breath hitching. "What…I don't…Dean?"
As freaky as this new development in their up-to-this-point exceedingly freaky day was, watching his brother's blood boiling on the floor-and it was, too, bubbling now and smoking a little-what really hit Dean with a jolt at that moment was a glimpse of Sam looking this freaked to hell about something that he must have thought that he was hallucinating. Was this the same sort of fear that he was clamping down on all the time, seeing things that weren't really there, but holding it together anyway to try and save face?
Well shit.
But the blood?
That was real.
And what the freaking hell….?
"Bobby?" Dean called again, while both he and Sam watched, mesmerized, as the blood actually friggin' started to roll away from them, stretching across the floor in some sinister miniature tide, over towards the bodies of the children.
Or, body. The girl was still lying in the center of the floor on her stomach, her limbs sprawled out, an odd shroud the same colorless dirty shade as the flood draped across her body. The boy, however, was standing, clad in what looked like a bloody, stained white men's oxford that hung down below his knees. He was still next to the girl, but he was looking in their direction curiously, bright blue eyes like lamps widening as his gaze flicked between them and the blood.
Taking in the sight of the boy, Dean felt his mouth fall open. Is that…how the hell….?
Bobby, who he could finally see standing a few feet away from the boy, was obviously undergoing a similar thought process, his eyes practically bulging out of his head as he stared at the boy, a gun he'd thought to grab raised.
"Cas?" Dean spluttered.
The boy nodded, once, gravely. "Hello, Dean." The voice was a bit lower than a kid of, what, seven, eight, maybe, should be, but it was very obviously the voice of a child, clear and small.
"What the…what-" He meant to say something along the lines of WHAT the hell are you, but he was cut off when Sam tugged at his sleeve and pointed at the blood. It had flowed completely over to where the girl was lying, running into the goo puddle around her, making the black liquid part where it flowed. It twined up one thin arm, the color startling and deadly against the pallor of her skin, and disappeared under her shoulder and curtain of hair. The girl twitched and shuddered, little gasps permeating the tense silence, before she startled awake with a cry. Her head snapped up.
Heavy-lidded, dark browed, her brown eyes wild and scared, her gaze roved around the room, her breaths coming in harsh pants. She was, to Dean's best approximation, five years old, six, something around there. She sat up, tucked her legs underneath her, pulled the dusty fabric tighter around herself, and stared back at them.
Cas-eight-year-old freaking Cas-looked at her, frowning, eyes darkening with obvious recognition. "That's-"
"Ruby," Sam finished, voice astonished but certain.
"Ruby?" Dean practically choked on the word.
What. The fuck.
"Yes," Cas said, with obvious distaste.
So yeah.
This was anything but simple.
"You gonna let me out of here?" came a tiny, shrill, annoyed voice from behind the panic room door.
"No," Dean and Sam yelled, together.
"'M gonna call CPS on your asses," came the response, tinny where it echoed off the panic room walls. "It's cold in here!"
Dean, Sam, and Bobby, along with a hastily handcuffed Cas-though the cuffs kept threatening to slip off his skinny wrists-were standing outside the door of the panic room, the girl who was allegedly Ruby locked inside the panic room behind them.
Bobby was shaking his head. "What…is she?" he asked, voice baffled, pointing at the door. He looked at Cas. "Hell, what're you?"
Cas shrugged. "The closest approximation I can make is that I am now a human child."
"What?" Dean snapped. "How?"
"And what happened to our Leviathan pals, and the souls?" Bobby asked. "I think you better tell us that first. That's more to the point, us makin' sure we don't have another apocalypse on our hands and all."
"I believe that they consumed each other," Cas said, brow furrowing. "They were…already warring within me by the time that I came to you."
"Warring?" it was Sam who spoke now. He looked a little worse for wear, sitting on the stairs with his arms wrapped around his knees, staring at one fixed spot on the floor, and Dean wondered if he was having a hard time keeping reality straight after the blood incident. But as far as he could tell, he'd been right about choking up the blood having not actually hurt him.
"Yes." Cas looked pained, his Adam's apple bobbing a little before he next spoke. Eyes that contained far too much startling depth, and anguish, to belong to a child looked up at them. "I could hear…I could hear their whispering to one another while they were still inside me. Purgatory is the turf of the Leviathans. How do you think that they would have treated what they viewed as intruders on their turf? Once inside me, and then again once contained within the panic room, the footing was much more…even."
"So they could fight each other?" Dean asked.
"Yes." Cas nodded. "On an earthly plane, the souls are, as you saw-" he shifted uncomfortably on his feet, looking ashamed-"are quite potent. In the vast numbers in which I had consumed them, they could hold their own against the Leviathans, who need a physical body to wreak havoc here but are weaker when either forced into a single body too weak to contain them or else disembodied altogether."
"Would you let me out!" Ruby screeched. "Or at least give me a damn blanket! And if there's still Leviathans in here hiding somewhere I swear…"
Dean ignored her. "So where did they all go?"
"The Leviathans were destroyed, I believe," Cas said. "I cannot say for certain, but it would appear that way." His brows knit. "The souls, however, it is harder to say. No soul can truly cease to exist. I believe they may have dissipated, returned to Purgatory."
"How? We didn't pop the lid for them to get back through," Bobby said.
"Presumably the same route taken by any soul of a monster when that monster is killed. They know the way. Instinctually."
"Okay," Dean began. He was willing to go with all that, for now. Less to think about at the moment. But what he really wanted to know? "But would you please explain to us why exactly you're a friggin' kid? And how she got here?" He gestured rather violently at the door, jaw clenched tight.
Because, and need he reiterate: Ruby? What. The fuck.
"I can explain if you bring me a damn parka," Ruby snapped, her voice much closer now, the door of the panic room shaking where she was likely banging on it with tiny fists. "And I'm human, assholes, so I can't hurt you anyway."
"She is?"
"I believe she is," Cas said. "And it is cold in there, which I suppose is alright if you do intend to let her freeze to death-"
"Screw you, Castiel," came Ruby's voice.
"Balls," Bobby muttered, scrubbing a hand over his face.
TBC here.
Art link: Art Masterlist
Prompt Number: 1016
Artist: Farfadine
Fic Title: Take Two
Author: crazybeagle
Fandom/Genre: Supernatural Humor/Angst/Hurt-comfort
Pairing(s): Gen, none (Characters: Castiel, Ruby, Dean, Sam, Bobby)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 13,750
Warnings: Language, allusions to torture and violence, psychological trauma
Summary: AU of 7.02. The Leviathans and the souls destroyed each other. But Dean, Sam, and Bobby know that things are never that simple. They know it for a fact when they find two dark-haired children, one wearing face of a former friend and one wearing the face of a former enemy, lying on the panic room floor....
Chapter One
The souls were gone.
The Leviathans were gone too, apparently. They'd have to make damn sure of that fact, but after a supernova of light when the souls collided with the gaping black holes in reality that were the disembodied Leviathans, and both exploded into a shower of white-hot sparks that burned their skin before fizzling out down on the concrete. Light and thunder ricocheting off the impenetrable iron walls of the panic room, consuming itself-like Leviathan pinball, Bobby had said.
They'd been prepared to leave for Bootback as per Death's instructions, but when Cas had stumbled through Bobby's door, begging for help and telling them it was too late, he couldn't hold back either souls or Leviathans anymore, they'd foregone all plans to do the ritual and Dean and Sam had helped drag him down to the panic room. The hope was, when Cas exploded, as he seemed to think that he would, and stat, that they could somewhat contain it in there, even temporarily, at least enough to keep them all from dying. In retrospect, it probably would've been smarter just to have dropped him off right in the doorway and slammed the door shut immediately rather than try to lug him over to the bed (because it wasn't like he really deserved that anyway) while Bobby waited just in the doorway for them, holding the door closed but unlatched behind him. But for whatever it was worth, they were unscathed, the Leviathans and souls apparently vanished.
But they all knew, things were never that simple.
They knew, because lying side-by-side on the dusty floor of the panic room, in a puddle of thick black liquid, were two pale, unconscious, dark-haired children. A boy and a girl.
So yeah.
Things were never that simple.
But what was of far more interest to Dean than what had just occurred between the souls and the Leviathans, or even the children-children-lying on the floor, was the fact that, sometime while the friggin' lights show or whatever it was had been going on, Sam had been driven to his knees, arms wrapped around himself, trembling.
"Sam?" A second later and Dean was down on his own knees, an arm hovering over Sam's back, sure that this was another one of the hallucinations that according to Death, Sam had not been telling them about.
Except, apparently, he was wrong. Because Sam had slapped a hand over his mouth, screwed his eyes shut, and was now coughing, hard and deep, shoulders heaving.
"Sam!" he repeated. Sam just kept coughing, nearly pitching forward onto the floor from the force of it. When it finally stopped, it stopped abruptly. Dazed, Sam let himself lean back until he was sitting, Dean catching him so he didn't slam his head into the wall behind them. He held up his hand, still cupped, expression uncomprehending as he looked at it.
His palm was full of blood. Bright. It coated his fingers, seeped out between them to drip onto the floor.
Dean's heart skipped a beat and a half at the sight of it. One of the children on the floor stirred feebly, the boy, maybe, but Dean ignored him. Bobby, somewhere close by, started to say something, but his voice was cut off when Sam coughed again, gagged, and spat out another, massive mouthful onto the gritty floor.
"Sam, hey-" He took Sam's shoulders, barely hearing his own words over the roaring in his ears or the blind panic mounting in his chest. "What's wrong? Did the Leviathans…" He didn't think the Leviathans or the souls, if that's what those even were, had gotten near enough to any of them to do any damage-bouncing around at least a good 15 feet over their heads. But it would be just their luck, wouldn't it, if one rogue one had bounced away from the rest and hurt Sam.
But Sam was shaking his head, brow furrowed. He spat out another mouthful of blood, wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, and rasped out, "No…'m fine."
Dean snorted. The sound was vaguely hysterical. "No. Whatever you are, it's not friggin' fine." He wiped away some of the blood on Sam's chin with his own sleeve. Out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw one of the children sit up. Bobby made a noise of surprise. Dean glanced at the child-the boy-but as weird-assed as that was, he needed to let Bobby deal with it.
"No, seriously," Sam said, after spitting again and clearing his throat. "I'm not hurt, nothing hurts…feel okay now. Except for, uh…" he gestured at the blood, down the front of his shirt and splattered on the floor, a genuinely baffled expression is his face.
"Yeah, except for that," Dean muttered. "Just don't move, okay?"
Sam blinked and nodded.
"Bobby!" Dean called over one shoulder. "We need some help here! Sam's-"
Sam cut him off. "Dean." His voice was odd. Small.
Dean whipped back around, anxious. "Yeah?"
Sam pointed, eyes wide, at the blood on the ground.
Something was…off. It was shifting, churning, the color of it going from the vivid red of fresh blood to the sickly dark burgundy of an old wound. And it was collecting, all of it, into a single pool-running off of Sam's hands, and even off of where it had sunk in splotches onto his shirt, leaving not a single stain behind, onto the ground to flow into the growing puddle before them.
Sam had gone pale, and he was blinking rapidly down at the blood, breath hitching. "What…I don't…Dean?"
As freaky as this new development in their up-to-this-point exceedingly freaky day was, watching his brother's blood boiling on the floor-and it was, too, bubbling now and smoking a little-what really hit Dean with a jolt at that moment was a glimpse of Sam looking this freaked to hell about something that he must have thought that he was hallucinating. Was this the same sort of fear that he was clamping down on all the time, seeing things that weren't really there, but holding it together anyway to try and save face?
Well shit.
But the blood?
That was real.
And what the freaking hell….?
"Bobby?" Dean called again, while both he and Sam watched, mesmerized, as the blood actually friggin' started to roll away from them, stretching across the floor in some sinister miniature tide, over towards the bodies of the children.
Or, body. The girl was still lying in the center of the floor on her stomach, her limbs sprawled out, an odd shroud the same colorless dirty shade as the flood draped across her body. The boy, however, was standing, clad in what looked like a bloody, stained white men's oxford that hung down below his knees. He was still next to the girl, but he was looking in their direction curiously, bright blue eyes like lamps widening as his gaze flicked between them and the blood.
Taking in the sight of the boy, Dean felt his mouth fall open. Is that…how the hell….?
Bobby, who he could finally see standing a few feet away from the boy, was obviously undergoing a similar thought process, his eyes practically bulging out of his head as he stared at the boy, a gun he'd thought to grab raised.
"Cas?" Dean spluttered.
The boy nodded, once, gravely. "Hello, Dean." The voice was a bit lower than a kid of, what, seven, eight, maybe, should be, but it was very obviously the voice of a child, clear and small.
"What the…what-" He meant to say something along the lines of WHAT the hell are you, but he was cut off when Sam tugged at his sleeve and pointed at the blood. It had flowed completely over to where the girl was lying, running into the goo puddle around her, making the black liquid part where it flowed. It twined up one thin arm, the color startling and deadly against the pallor of her skin, and disappeared under her shoulder and curtain of hair. The girl twitched and shuddered, little gasps permeating the tense silence, before she startled awake with a cry. Her head snapped up.
Heavy-lidded, dark browed, her brown eyes wild and scared, her gaze roved around the room, her breaths coming in harsh pants. She was, to Dean's best approximation, five years old, six, something around there. She sat up, tucked her legs underneath her, pulled the dusty fabric tighter around herself, and stared back at them.
Cas-eight-year-old freaking Cas-looked at her, frowning, eyes darkening with obvious recognition. "That's-"
"Ruby," Sam finished, voice astonished but certain.
"Ruby?" Dean practically choked on the word.
What. The fuck.
"Yes," Cas said, with obvious distaste.
So yeah.
This was anything but simple.
"You gonna let me out of here?" came a tiny, shrill, annoyed voice from behind the panic room door.
"No," Dean and Sam yelled, together.
"'M gonna call CPS on your asses," came the response, tinny where it echoed off the panic room walls. "It's cold in here!"
Dean, Sam, and Bobby, along with a hastily handcuffed Cas-though the cuffs kept threatening to slip off his skinny wrists-were standing outside the door of the panic room, the girl who was allegedly Ruby locked inside the panic room behind them.
Bobby was shaking his head. "What…is she?" he asked, voice baffled, pointing at the door. He looked at Cas. "Hell, what're you?"
Cas shrugged. "The closest approximation I can make is that I am now a human child."
"What?" Dean snapped. "How?"
"And what happened to our Leviathan pals, and the souls?" Bobby asked. "I think you better tell us that first. That's more to the point, us makin' sure we don't have another apocalypse on our hands and all."
"I believe that they consumed each other," Cas said, brow furrowing. "They were…already warring within me by the time that I came to you."
"Warring?" it was Sam who spoke now. He looked a little worse for wear, sitting on the stairs with his arms wrapped around his knees, staring at one fixed spot on the floor, and Dean wondered if he was having a hard time keeping reality straight after the blood incident. But as far as he could tell, he'd been right about choking up the blood having not actually hurt him.
"Yes." Cas looked pained, his Adam's apple bobbing a little before he next spoke. Eyes that contained far too much startling depth, and anguish, to belong to a child looked up at them. "I could hear…I could hear their whispering to one another while they were still inside me. Purgatory is the turf of the Leviathans. How do you think that they would have treated what they viewed as intruders on their turf? Once inside me, and then again once contained within the panic room, the footing was much more…even."
"So they could fight each other?" Dean asked.
"Yes." Cas nodded. "On an earthly plane, the souls are, as you saw-" he shifted uncomfortably on his feet, looking ashamed-"are quite potent. In the vast numbers in which I had consumed them, they could hold their own against the Leviathans, who need a physical body to wreak havoc here but are weaker when either forced into a single body too weak to contain them or else disembodied altogether."
"Would you let me out!" Ruby screeched. "Or at least give me a damn blanket! And if there's still Leviathans in here hiding somewhere I swear…"
Dean ignored her. "So where did they all go?"
"The Leviathans were destroyed, I believe," Cas said. "I cannot say for certain, but it would appear that way." His brows knit. "The souls, however, it is harder to say. No soul can truly cease to exist. I believe they may have dissipated, returned to Purgatory."
"How? We didn't pop the lid for them to get back through," Bobby said.
"Presumably the same route taken by any soul of a monster when that monster is killed. They know the way. Instinctually."
"Okay," Dean began. He was willing to go with all that, for now. Less to think about at the moment. But what he really wanted to know? "But would you please explain to us why exactly you're a friggin' kid? And how she got here?" He gestured rather violently at the door, jaw clenched tight.
Because, and need he reiterate: Ruby? What. The fuck.
"I can explain if you bring me a damn parka," Ruby snapped, her voice much closer now, the door of the panic room shaking where she was likely banging on it with tiny fists. "And I'm human, assholes, so I can't hurt you anyway."
"She is?"
"I believe she is," Cas said. "And it is cold in there, which I suppose is alright if you do intend to let her freeze to death-"
"Screw you, Castiel," came Ruby's voice.
"Balls," Bobby muttered, scrubbing a hand over his face.
TBC here.